Re: Excellent News - Bush Approval Slumps

B.B. wrote: 
In article <cDQ4f.21522$MG.8859@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
 TheLetterK <theletterk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]


This is an exceedingly silly claim. The government can certainly pay down debt, both internal and external, through higher taxation. Please explain what mechanism prevents this.

Internal national debt is gauged by a negative deficit in services claimed to be provided through money gained by taxes and other money-gathering ventures undertaken by the federal government. Increasing the amount of services provided for your tax dollars is the only reasonable way to pay off an internal national debt. You cannot pay "money owed to the people" by taking more money from the people.

In other words, you have to increase governmental efficiency to 'pay off' the 'internal' portion of the national debt. How large the national debt really is, is also questionable. Do you gauge national debt by adding together decades of budget deficits and applying interest? Well, you can, but national economics are a bit more complex than personal economics.


You've way oversimplified it. 
Remember who I am addressing.

The "badness" of the fed's internal deficit/debt depends on how they move the money around. Where they get it vs. where they spend it. At the present, the federal government is taking a larger proportion of its income from the poor (meaning in this context the half of the income spectrum opposite the side called rich) due to a series of tax cuts that have benefitted mostly the wealthy.
In an effort to stimulate a flagging economy. Who do you consider more likely to invest in companies and startups? A man barely making ends meet with a $30,000 a year job--or the investment banker turning $200,000 a year? Unless you propose that everyone should go on welfare, then jobs are needed. The fastest way to grow the economy (and the number of jobs) is to reduce the burden on those most likely to invest. That means the upper class. Do keep in mind that they contribute the most at tax time.

Simultaneously, they've been structuring policies and laws so that the bulk of the money is spent on large entities, like the contractors in Iraq, the military's other various contractors, and bonds sales to
overseas nations like China.
When a socialist offers you kool-aid, don't accept. It's bad for your image and your sanity.

So you wind up with a situation where money is actually pushed by the federal government up the income ladder. That's bad because every economy that has a huge spread between rich and poor with little or no middle class is either dysfunctional now, or has already failed.
How much do you expect those making more than $100,000 a year to pay? 50% of their income? It's already above 30%, on *average*. That's after the big tax cut.

Our current government tops that by also pumping a good fraction of that cash overseas.
That is completely unconstitutional and needs to stop, I agree. It is not our responsibility to provide disaster relief, or to fund African wars. Or to defend countries that are not our polticial allies.

OTOH, the federal government has in the past done the opposite on a short-term basis with public works projects like the Hoover Dam. Capital gains and estate taxes coupled with medicare and similar programs were also designed to actively push money down the economy to keep it balanced.
The only way to effectively combat the 'upward creep' you despise is to slash budget expendatures. Which won't happen as long as you idiots keep voting the superparty back into power.

Among the possible solutions is, as you say, increasing the bang for the buck from federal programs. Also among the possible solutions would be returning the tax and spending structure to where it was a decade ago. Because that was working just fine.
That was only working because the feds were able to ride a massive market upturn. We felt the effects of those policies during the tail end of the Clinton years (when the market bubble burst) and most of Bush's first term.
.

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